Tagged: How to reupholster chair

Hi! I’m Katie Stiles with Before And After TV. Today, I’m going to show you how you can, very easily yourself, reupholster a chair. I’ve purchased 6 antique, dining room chairs that I purchased at a flea market. They’re about 60 years old, and, the seats have definitely had their day! It’s very cracked and worn leather. I’m going to show you how easily you can do it yourself, and everything that you need to do it!

So, the first thing you’re gonna want to do is pop your seat out. Some seats will be screwed in, some will come out easily. This one came out easily.

And, what I’ve done, is I’ve had a piece of foam cut to the same shape. I had 6 of these cut, and I’m gonna glue it onto the surface of the seat. Now, I’m gonna use some regular, white glue, and, anything that says foam use on it is fine. And, we’re gonna make sure that we cover the entire piece of foam, for lots of coverage!

Now, I’ve used a inch thickness of foam, and it’s quite a dense foam. The denser the foam, the more life you’re gonna get out of it.

So, next we’re going to take our foam and we’re gonna put it on top of our seat, and line it up. And, this is gonna have to dry for probably at least an hour. And, the best way to let your seat dry with the foam on it is to flip it over, and that will give it the weight of the seat for the drying process.

Now, I’ve picked a really modern pattern and piece of material with some bright colors. And, now that the glue has dried, we’re ready to cover the chair!

So, we’re gonna lay our piece of material down with the pattern side down, and I’ve cut it so it’s about 6 inches on each side, to give us the room. And, we’re gonna place our seat cushion, foam side down, on top of it.

We’re going to pull up our first side of material, and, the key thing to remember throughout all of this is to keep everything nice and tight. We’re gonna start right in the middle of that. Using a staple gun and pulling tight, we put our first staple in.

Now, we’re gonna pull up on the opposite side, and again, pull in nice and tight. Find your center. Again with the staple gun, right in the middle.

And, then our 4th side – pull it tight.

Now that we have our material – all 4 sides secure – we’re going to start from each staple and work our way out along the sides, until we get just to before the corners, ’cause we’re going to do the corners last.

Space them probably about an inch apart, and remember to pull up tightly on the material, every time you staple.

Now, there’s just the corners left to do, and, you can cut off an excess of material. Just pull up on the corner and just cut off about 2 inches that you will not need, and it will just make it easier to put all of your staples in.

Now, at the corners, you really want to pull up hard. And, it’s ok if you get a little bit of gathers, because that looks normal on a chair. Just try and get it all as smooth as you can. Try and keep your gathers on the underside of the chair as much as you can. Keep it nice and tight.
You’re gonna wanna put probably about 3 staples into this area.

Now, we go to our next corner and pull as tight as we can.

So, there you have it. The corners, the sides, are all done. It took about 10 minutes to do. I’m gonna pop this back into place, to show you how it looks. Just take it back to our chair, pop it back into place, and, there you have it!